"The power of love is a curious thing."
Yes, that is from Huey Lewis & The News. Go ahead and try and say they're not a great band, I'll wait while your feeble assertions crumble in your mind before making it out your mouth. I'm kidding, but seriously it's a great song from a great band. But, that's not really what I wanted to talk about today.
I've taken some time off, probably too much time. I tended to do most of my recent writing in one specific location, which I was absent from between semesters, which allowed me to drift away from blogging for a bit, chain of excuses, etc etc. Recently I've been trying to come up with a worthwhile topic to return with, and I think it came to me throughout the week. So here we go.
It occurred to me, slowly over the course of many years and a fair bit of casual observation that we, on this planet, are not necessarily set up for success. This isn't really a shocking revelation, inequity is everywhere and you have to be a particular kind of blind or stubborn not to see it. But I'm not talking right now about genetic, socioeconomic, gender, or whatever other types of inequities that may come to the mind of you, the reader. I'm talking about perhaps something a bit more devious, a lot more pervasive, and something that I think is uniquely achievable as far as it is obtainable by everyone. I'm talking about Love, and what seems to be the long-standing quiet conspiracy to get rid of it.
Bear with me a bit here, I'll try to outline a general example of what I mean, inspired by my own experiences, and let you ponder on it yourself to see if you can find your own examples. From early on, as children, a large percentage of us (us being humanity) are born and raised into loving environments. Our parents and immediate family members love us, we're taught to say it, embrace it, express it, live it, be it. This continues for several years and we develop rapidly. We start expanding our social interactions, most notably in school, and then something starts to change. As small children it's totally ok to love all your friends, even if they're the same genders, because we're young and apparently don't know any better (or do we?). As we get older and are subjected to more "societalization" our instincts to love and in turn be loved are purposefully diminished. Eventually, it's not ok for boys to love boys, it's still ok for girls to love girls, but there's a line there too. Love becomes something we say less and less, hear about less and less, and starts to become more defined and relegated to special circumstances.
Eventually it's presented to us as something special, which up to this point it has still been for us. But this sort of special is rare, hard to hang on to, potentially hurtful, exceptionally valuable, and not a guarantee beyond immediate family. Again, when we were young, it was omnipresent with no restrictions. So now we adapt to this new limiting concept. Right about when we could start questioning this new definition along comes the mass media in the forms of books, songs and movies that inundate our childhood experience. We all have the Disney movies we love, the books we grew up reading, the songs from our childhoods. We can still quote them, recall how they made us feel. Think about this, and I agree it's a bit of a stretch, but in Beauty and the Beast, did you ever stop to look at how Gaston really does care for Belle? He probably experienced at some point a legitimate form of positive affection for her. At some point he clearly loses the ability to articulate himself correctly, not that Belle seems particularly receptive or empathetic towards him. She's clearly had her idea of love reinforced by...the books she reads! This gets her believing that love is this special abstract thing reserved for rare opportunity when a soul mate finally presents itself to live happily ever after with. Maybe if she would have been a bit more loving towards Gaston he wouldn't have felt the need to go out of his way to murder something he didn't understand? Instead, we're presented with a story of how one selfish, self-entitled, evil man is turned into a beast for his crimes but is redeemed by learning to love and connect in a positive, full-being way with another human being, Belle. Belle, the same woman who despite all her charm, wonder and splendor somehow can't go out of her way to try and understand a very similar sort of man who happens to live in the village that she's from? That guy's beyond redemption, but the 'Prince' isn't? That hardly seems fair, just, or reasonable, doesn't it? Don't get me wrong, I still like the movie, "Kill the Beast" is a badass song, but I just thing that perhaps it lacks a bit in teaching tolerance and understanding.
But this leads me to my point, that our media influences cement in the idea that love is a selective emotion, not our base emotion. And please don't misunderstand me, I don't mean base to be somehow belittling or debasing. It's our basic emotion, our first, our primary, our root, the emotion from which all positive emotions can spring. So now we're nearly grown up and we're moving through life with a selective form of love, boxed and packaged and waiting for someone to come by to meet certain pre-set, reinforced criteria in order to receive our Love. What's the overall effect of this? We isolate ourselves from each other. Without being able to live and fully feel our core emotion, Love, we cannot fully interact with our surroundings or each other. We are taught to create a specific division between ourselves, and we're taught to believe it's for our own good. We maintain the illusion through our fantasies, fueled by the stories that entertain us and the songs we listen to. We even get to a point where we actually begin to fear Love; fear the pain it could bring to our lives, the burden it can be if we don't want it, fear the risks of the emotion more than we hope for its rewards. That's no way to live, and we can see daily the Hell it has wrought.
Our world exists in perpetual dissonance, in disunity. And this is where I begin to see the scheme of the nefarious plot. As long as we don't love each other, it's that much easier to hate each other. Hate and other similar emotions we can feel all the time (they're completely socially acceptable after all), because in the absence of Love it is easier to feel negative emotions. Our being abhors voids, we seem to seek to fill any emptiness with something. I believe our inclination is to find a positive filler to replace the emptiness in our lives, but our natural inclination has been subjected to societal reconstruction. We now actively seek negatives to fill the holes left by our self-removed positives. The long-term effect is that we live in a world where we are selectively isolated from 99.99% of the population, even though we have so much more in common than we probably could invent as differences. That was step one of the evil plot, maybe I'll elaborate on the next one another time.
Love is more than just a feeling for us, it's a state of being. I myself really only came back to this positive state, this existence of Love, in the last few years. I went through intense feelings of isolation and eventually got myself diagnosed with depression. But depression isn't a diagnosis, it's a symptom, isn't it? Depression is a state caused by something else, it indicates a deficiency somewhere in our lives. Mine was love. Early on, teenage angst and hormones had me longing to find that one special person to make all my pain disappear. In the course of waiting for that person, I turned away from others I "obviously didn't love or even like that much" (despite being awesome, caring people in their own right), further growing a gap between me and others. When I eventually found that special someone, it eventually fell apart and the pain of that loss overcame the ability to feel the positive, feel Love. I then spent years being a pissy young 20's who pursued less than pure interactions and purposefully avoided feeling anything positive or meaningful, anything that connected me with the soul of the person. That left me miserable too.
Eventually, as I began exploring these pangs of doubt and these questions I continued to have, began embracing my natural empathic abilities that I was going to great lengths to ignore, I began to undo my societal programming. I began to see the world differently, and I embraced that change and began looking for more answers. Mind you, I was still pissy, but now in my mid 20's. That negative quality about me couldn't go away on its own, it was too fused with my being to be removed. I needed the security it provided too much and too often. But, one day, a miracle happened that I didn't quite fully grasp until recently. I met someone who changed my life, and has continued to do so since that first day. I felt a feeling, a strong and positive pull towards her and instead of ignoring it or attempting to redefine it or put it in this category or that, I went for it, purely and wholeheartedly. I still wasn't capable of living in love fully, I hadn't made it yet, I couldn't do it on my own. But my recent epiphany is that without her, I could never have made the transition to the more luminous me that I am today at all. The love she provided gave me what I needed to facilitate the change. For years I've attributed my success to me and what I've done, and I'd never stopped to see that without a strong base, Love, any structure I raised would crumble. She provided me with that base while I changed, and now that I have, we can continue to grow together. But now, I feel like a near fully functional person, and now I am capable of helping others make the transition as well.
Love isn't supposed to be a rarity. It's supposed to be all around us. We're all looking for it, though maybe we're afraid of admitting that. But if we're afraid of Love it's because we were taught to fear it, taught to misunderstand it. We need to start changing, we need to risk letting ourselves feel the most positive of emotions for the most complete of strangers, because in a world where the predominant emotion is Love, Humanity will flourish. And we all need to flourish.
-M
